I have blogged here before about my good friend and former roommate Jarrod Davis, who is a visual effects guy and who (ab)used his awesome powers to sneak the spaceship from our Star Wars roleplaying campaign into Firefly and Serenity, after which some other VFX artist put it in BSG. This is another such tale of cross-universe pollination, copied with permission from one of Jarrod’s Facebook comments.

So we on the Crew were all about cameos, and I do believe it was Lee Stringer who had the idea to put the Serenity in the show [Battlestar Galactica] somewhere. It fell to me because I had these shots in the hospital where Laura Roslin gets her cancer diagnosis with all these windows that needed filling with spaceshippy goodness. Perfect opportunity of course.

So I do it. And you’ve seen it. And I think, hey eventually some nerd will see this and get a chuckle out of it.

WRONG.

The VERY NEXT DAY, Fireflyfans.net had a giant HD screengrab up on their site. “LOOK! SERENITY IN BSG! LOOK! L@@K! SEE IT!” and other such internetisms as are designed to capture one’s attention.

I was not expecting that.

Some weeks later, my boss Loni [Peristere] would relay this story to me:

He was meeting with Joss Whedon and Tim Minear (yes, the legendary writers and showrunners responsible for many of your favorite programs) about one of the shows we were working on or going to work on.

So, Joss says, “So… I hear that the Serenity ended up inside Galactica…?”

Loni: (laughing it off) “Oh yeah, hehe, Mal took a job that took ’em out to the Twelve Colonies… hehe LOL”

Joss: “Hah, that’s cool.”
Tim: “No, that’s not cool.”

Loni: [???worried???]

Joss: “Wha? Naw, man, it’s cool…”
Tim: “No, it is most certainly NOT cool! You can’t just do stuff like that!”

Loni: [???shrinking… scared…]

Me, hearing this story later: [shrinking, scared crap-less, sweating]

Joss: “Calm down, it’s fine…”
Tim: “No, it’s not fine! You can’t just let them do stuff like this!”